With a voice as rich as her catalog of inspirations, the Nigerian native singer-songwriter and multi-platinum selling recording artist fuses Pop, Afro pop-driven, and soft-soul, taking cues from cross-continental greats– from Fela Kuti to Miriam Makeba; King Sunny Adé to Sade; Tina Turner to Lenny Kravitz. But on Lucid, Asa doesn’t find her voice; she amplifies it.
With Lucid, the audience travels with her storied songs and sounds, but Asa’s right at home. Here, her emotive range strikes again. Whether it’s piercing through the surface of the soul with “words like dagger” as on “The Beginning” or when she croons with conviction and calmness over steady guitar chords on the soft melancholy of being held hostage in a hard love affair in the album’s opening “Murder In The USA.” Throughout standouts “Femi Mo,” “Good Thing,” and “My Dear” she switches between English, and Yoruba, but the emotion laced in each lyric needs no translation.
